by John Cheever
•
On Sunday afternoon my only brother comes to call. He is told that if he drinks again he will die, and he is drunk—the bleary eyes, the swollen face, the puffy hands, the drunkard’s paunch. He wants to be alone with me to tell me this story: “The funniest goddamned thing happened to me. They gave me the Boston territory, you know. Well, I was in a bar watching one of those TV debates, and I got so goddamned stinking that I didn’t know what I was doing. I decided that I wanted to see Al Houston so I got into the car and started off and the next thing I knew I was in jail and you know where? In our hometown. I was in jail at home. Well, they took away my license and fined me a hundred bucks. It’s the second time. So when they let me go I got a suspended sentence, and you know who was there? Mildred Cunningham. She married Al. You remember her. So I said, ‘Hi, Mildred, I was going out to see Al a couple of nights ago.’ And you know what she said? ‘I buried him six months ago.’ Funniest goddamned thing.” What is involved seems almost beyond my comprehension. He is drunk. He has lost his job and will not be given another. And in his drunkenness he has tried to find a college roommate, an old friend of forty years ago, a homosexual friend for all I know—although this may be an ugly suspicion—and has ended up in the jail of the town where our prominent and respectable parents shaped a life for themselves and for us, and he refers to this whole series of events as an uproarious joke. I think this is insanity. I have been drinking and make my long complaints to Mary, who is most tender, but I do not make love to her, because I think I must carry this through alone.
•
Looking around me I seem to find an uncommon amount of misery and drunkenness. We are not cold, poor, hungry, lonely, or miserable in any other common way, so why should so many of us struggle to forget our happy lot? Is it the ineradicable strain of guilt and vengefulness in man’s nature?
•
A warm day; we lunch on the outside steps and my old dick stirs in the sunlight like a hyacinth. Later, in the warmth, taking away wheelbarrow-loads of dead leaves, I am suddenly very tired. I move slowly and painfully, like an old man. Pain seems like a rivet put through my chest into my back. Then I think that I shall not live to see the spring; I shall soon die. “John is dead, he died quite suddenly. Do try to get to the church early. We are so afraid there won’t be room.” My muffled voice rises from the casket: “But I haven’t finished my work. My seven novels, my two plays, and the libretto for an opera. It isn’t done.” The priest tells me to be still. Preparations are made for a crowd, but on the big day the telephone begins to ring: “It’s Binxie’s only chance to play golf. We’re sure John would understand. He was always so carefree.” “It’s Mabel’s only chance to go shopping.” Etc. In the end n one comes. I see the disgusting morbidity of all this, I try to cleanse my mind. If we do not taste death, how will we know the winter from the spring? I paint shutters, cut a little wood, light a fire. The clear light of the fire is appealing; this, and the sound of water, is what I want. How far away from X’s underwear, lying on the floor in a heap. I will have love tonight, I think, fire and water, and I drink to still my anxieties and misgivings, but I fail. I have been in this poor place before, and I shall find my way out.
•
I wake before daylight in an ecstasy of sereneness. I think that I will have it all back: the green seas of the North Atlantic, the wit and high spirits of a randy life, blue-sky courage, a natural grasp of things. I think that I will have it all back. I dream a pleasant dream with pleasant and unpleasant figures. The most unsavory drops his britches, but, dear God, why should I worry about this anymore? I meet old friends from my childhood. I see a quality of love like a length of cloth, tranquil and unanxious, a fine, sere shade. And I will go out of that dread country where I lie sweating in bed, waiting for the oil burner to engorge the house with fire, waiting to be crushed by my debts, my groin smarting like a wound. I will have it all back.
•
“The Bridge” off, and it may be less than nothing. I split some wood and talk with F.—a pleasant hour. Wake before dawn, thinking of several things, including the liverish-colored thigh of C. The book, the book.
•
Unable to work because of the dark, the cold, and the snow—a pitiable state of affairs—and so I lose a day. At the breakfast table I say, “I don’t understand Susie at all,” and I shiver with unhappiness or despair. “I’ve fed her, bathed her, taken her up in the night, plucked thorns and splinters out of her feet, loved her, taught her to swim, skate, walk on beaches, admire the world, but now when I speak to her she weeps and slams the door, hides in the woods on a fine Sunday morning, seems on the one hand merry and on the other to carry some unanswered question. Is this a glimpse of our inability to understan one another? I seem to know more about a stranger on a train than I know about my only daughter.”
•
Let us pray for all of those killed or cruelly wounded on throughways, expressways, freeways, and turnpikes. Let us pray for all of those burned or otherwise extinguished in faulty plane landings, midair collisions, and mountainside crashes. Let us pray for all alcoholics measuring out the hours of the day that the Lord hath made in pints and fifths, and let us pray for the man who mistook a shirt button for a Miltown pill and choked to death in a hotel.
•
Hemingway shot himself yesterday morning. There was a great man. I remember walking down a street in Boston after reading a book of his, and finding the color of the sky, the faces of strangers, and the smells of the city heightened and dramatized. The most important thing he did for me was to legitimatize manly courage, a quality that I had heard, until I came on his work, extolled by Scoutmasters and others who made it seem a fraud. He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain. There was never, in my time, anyone to compare with him.
•
I get up at half past six to get breakfast—in a fair humor, I think, but while I am shaving, so to speak, Mary also rises, scowls, coughs, makes small noises of pain, and I speak meanly. “Can I do anything to help you, short of dropping dead?” I am offered no breakfast, so I have none—but that we, at this time of life and time of day, should reënact the bitter and ugly quarrels of our parents, circling angrily around the toaster and the orange-juice squeezer like bent and toothless gladiators exhaling venom, bile, detestation, and petulance in one another’s direction! “Can I make a piece of toast?” “Would you mind waiting until I’ve made mine?” Mother finally grabbing her breakfast plate off the table and eating from the sideboard, her back to the room, tears streaming down her cheeks. Dad sitting at the table asking, “For Christ’s sake, what have I done to deserve this?” “Leave me alone, just leave me alone is all I ask,” says she. “All I want,” he says, “is a boiled egg. Is that too much to ask?” “Well, boil yourself an egg then,” she screams; and this is the full voice of tragedy, the goat cry. “Boil yourself an egg then, but leave me alone.” “But how in hell can I boil an egg,” he shouts, “if you won’t let me use the pot?” “I’d let you use the pot,” she screams, “but you leave it so filthy. I don’t know what it is, but you leave everything you touch covered with filth.” “I bought the pot,” he roars, “the soap, the eggs. I pay the water and the gas bills, and here I sit in my own house unable to boil an egg. Starving.” “Here,” she screams, “eat my breakfast. I can’t eat it. You’ve ruined my appetite. You’ve ruined my day.” She thrusts her breakfast plate at him and drops it on the table. “But I don’t want your breakfast,” he says. “I don’t like fried eggs. I detest fried eggs. Why should I be expected to eat your breakfast?” “Because I can’t eat it,” she screams. “I couldn’t eat anything in an atmosphere like this. Eat my breakfast. Eat it, enjoy it, but shut up and leave me alone.” He pushes the plate away from him, and buries his face in his hands. She takes the plate and throws the fried eggs into the garbage, sobbing horribly. She goes upstairs. The children, who have been waked by this calamitous and heroic dialogue, wonder
why this good day that the Lord hath made should seem so calamitous.
•
Mrs. Vanderlip is having her bomb shelter, constructed for the First World War, made hydrogenproof. Inquiries on bomb shelters have increased two hundred percent. The general feeling is that they should be secret, that if their existence is known they will only be small battlefields. “I,” says a woman in Cambridge, “wish to be part of that ten percent that will survive and reëstablish the world.” “The sooner we are killed the better,” says another. But this is it; this has never been seen before—the population of this mighty nation in utter confusion about the enduring nature of their sense of good and evil, about whether they should be prepared to live underground.
•
Susie due in at 2 A.M. I go to meet the train. This seems the end of the line: trains, bells, whistles, a shrill sound in the air like the trains of France and Italy, hammering somewhere, yellow headlights, showers of golden fire and modest lightnings. A pretty girl sits in the dark cabstand. One more train and her boy will take her home. I g into a bar. Two men play pool. One shoots a good and lucky game and has a most light and simple face and stance, as if life had been for him always a nourishing, uncomplicated, and easily digestible dish. “There’s an extra News and Mirror here,” one says, looking kindly through his spectacles at the others. “You want one?” “What did the daily double pay?” “Seven-fifty.” “You had five, I had four.” “We shoulda got together. I’ll bring the chick over tomorrow night and we’ll have some cherry.” “I got two hanging right here,” says the bartender, jiggling his balls. Drawn, thin, needing a shave, his apron soiled, does he feel the crippling need, mount his old woman, gasping, gasping, gasping? A nice, comfortable place.
•
A brilliant autumn day. Searching lights. Many vapor trails drawn high, due north. Are these warriors or businessmen eating butterfly shrimp off plastic trays? Is this the end of the earth or a bond to keep it from ending? Hot and cold, brilliance and darkness, the afterglow as fine as anything seen in the mountains; but X, studying the stars, would find in this wall of brilliance a reflection of his own emotional vacuity.
•
Hurricane watch, they say. Heavy rains after midnight. Gale winds. I wake at three. It is close. No sign of wind and rain. Then I think that I can do it, make sense of it, and recount my list of virtues: valor, saneness, decency, the ability to handle the natural hazards of life.
•
Ossining-Saratoga. September 22nd. Signs of autumn, going north. Goldenrod, asters, and what seems to be heather in the fields. The uplifting sight of the mountains and the sense of the agedness of the planet, the violence with which its crust was formed—now that Dr. Turnquist and other humble men who sometimes pick their teeth with matches can destroy this ancient carapace. We edge past a stern-faced woman in a red Volkswagen, a man and a girl side by side in a convertible, two gray-haired ladies, and an elderly couple. Truly objects in a stream. The gimcrack outskirts of Saratoga and this old and massive house, Yaddo; the shadow of a tower and battlements drawn on the grass.
•
Saul Bellow blows in at half past eleven. The fine, pale face, the uncommonly large eyes with their startling show of white—and for me, as often for a stranger on a train, a deep and sometimes troubling sense of kinship as if we had, somewhere between Montreal and Chicago, between Quincy and Rome, shared the burdens of a self-destructive uncle. This is not a friendship or an acquaintanceship; but when he comes across the hall to say goodbye my instinct is to hold him back, to plead with him to stay, although I never seem to have much to say to him. He has nearly finished another novel, and I have not.
The Yaddo board meeting as usual. I have the same trouble trying to make my presence in the gathering a reality. Now and then I catch the white of Saul’s eye and think, He is my brother. But the exchange is startling. A., after wiring that he could not come, blows in late. A broad, Irish face, florid with drink. The large teeth, colored unevenly like maize. Long, dark lashes, and what must have been fine blue eyes, all their persuasiveness lost in rheum. He has the unmistakable grooming of the alcoholic, the foundering sport. Brass buttons on his jacket; the black hair, stained with gray, slicked down and secured by some preparation to his thick skull. In the end he may not make much sense, but you won’t find a lock of hair out of place. With my long, long nose I smell the cutting stink of grain alcohol on his breath, but it is his style, what he has to say, that troubles me most and drives home the evils of drink. He speaks in the bemused soliloquy of someone with a bun on who, rising gracefully above his real troubles and worries, finds his life fascinating, his jokes funny, and the design and color of his digressions rich and splendid. And I think of some child, my own daughter, perhaps, listening to a drunkard’s tales. During the meeting my own personality seems dispersed. I seem further demolished by the white of Saul’s eye. I wonder foolishly about the supremacy of his creative energies. I gather myself together; I seem to move around the room stooping to pick up fragments of myself and binding my broken person together with a sense of humor.
•
Mary maldisposta, I think, and I think, after drinking, that in middle age we come into the big scenes; that I am perhaps no longer able to make a rueful joke of my disappointments; that I can no longer carr the burden of her eccentricity; that I must speak loudly; that I must say what I feel. It is not in the light of day that my disappointments are keenest, most painful. It is when staring into the dark, counting the figures on the wallpaper in the beam of light from the children’s bathroom, that I feel my spirits collapse. I can’t be sure that I don’t imagine this, that the fault is not mine. When I see her, come near her, rage and hatred, a curdling sensation, rise up from my feet to the top of my head with the speed of light. I don’t know what happened, and it is one of those situations where scrutiny is not rewarding. The turning point may have come when I asked her if she wasn’t going out for the evening; it may have come when I poured a second drink. I was putting poison in the mole burrows, admiring the brilliance of the afternoon. “See how the cut grass, the last growth of the year, full of clover, takes the light? Isn’t it beautiful?” I ask, but there is no reply. She hurries away from me. So the pleasures of the afternoon are over. I sit down to read. She slams a door. I quiz my son on his homework, heady with self-righteousness. But I cannot lie down beside her and sleep. So I retire to the spare room—the thousands of nights I have spent on sofas! My beloved son has a nightmare at three or four. The cat wakes me, going from room to room, meowing.
•
And thinking how our origins catch up with us I wonder what I will have to pay on this account. I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more interesting and sometimes more significant. I have turned my eccentric old mother into a woman of wealth and position, and made my father a captain at sea. I have improvised a background for myself—genteel, traditional—and it is generally accepted. But what are the bare facts, if I were to write them? The yellow house, the small north living room with a player piano and, on a card table, a small stage where I made scenery and manipulated puppets. The old mahogany gramophone with its crank, its pitiful power of reproduction. In the dining room, an overhead lamp made from the panels of a mandarin coat. Against the wall, the helm of my father’s sailboat—long gone, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Most of my characters are waited on by maids, but I was usually the one who brought the dishes to the table. My parents were not happy, and I was not happy with them. I was told that he mean to harm me, and I suppose I never forgave him. But my heart seems to have been open and I was innocently, totally in love with G. when I must have been ten or eleven. At twelve I was in love with J., at thirteen in love with F., etc. There was no possibility of requital for my feelings toward my father, and so I looked to other men for the force of censure, challenge, the encouragement that I needed, and was given this abundantly by W. But it seems, in retrospect, to have been almost en
tirely an improvisation. I have the characteristics of a bastard.
•
At the place where I go for coffee, three clerks from Stern’s, their eyes as heavily painted as the queens of the Nile. “Last night,” one says, “we had pork chops; I got them at the supermarket, a special, hickory-smoked pork chops. You know, an introductory offer. Very good. I mean they had this smoky flavor, and I opened a jar of applesauce. But you know what he says as soon as he tastes this extra goodness? ‘Novelty meats,’ he says. You’re buying novelty meats. When will you ever get it through your thick head that I can’t afford these novelty meats?’ ” “How are the birds?” one of them asks. “Oh they’re so cute!” “We had chicken,” says the second. “I bought two nice fryers on Thursday and there was enough left over for last night.”
